There is an almost epic coherence about the ballads of the Robin Hood cycle. This good robber, who with his merry men haunted the forests of Sherwood and Barnsdale, was the real ballad hero and the darling of the popular fancy which created him. For though the names of his confessor, Friar Tuck; his mistress, Maid Marian; and his companions, Little John, Scathelock, and Much the miller's son, have an air of reality,--and though the tradition has associated itself with definite localities,--there is nothing historical about Robin Hood. Langland, in the fourteenth century, mentions "rhymes of Robin Hood"; and efforts have been made to identify him with one of the dispossessed followers of Simon de Montfort, in "the Barons' War," or with some still earlier free-booter, of Hereward's time, who had taken to the woods and lived by plundering the Normans. Myth as he is, he is a thoroughly national conception. He had the English love of fair play; the English readiness to shake hands and make up when worsted in a square fight. He killed the King's venison, but was a loyal subject. He took from the rich and gave to the poor, executing thus a kind of wild justice. He defied legal authority in the person of the proud sheriff of Nottingham, thereby appealing to that secret sympathy with lawlessness which marks a vigorous, free yeomanry.[32] He had the knightly virtues of courtesy and hospitality, and the yeomanly virtues of good temper and friendliness. And finally, he was a mighty archer with the national weapons, the long-bow and the cloth-yard shaft; and so appealed to the national love of sport in his free and careless life under the greenwood tree. The forest scenery give a poetic background to his exploits, and though the ballads, like folk-poetry in general, seldom linger over natural descriptions, there is everywhere a consciousness of this background and a wholesome, outdoor feeling: "In somer, when the shawes be sheyne, And leves be large and long, Hit is full mery in feyre foreste To here the foulys song: "To se the dere draw to the dale, And leve the hillis hee, And shadow hem in the leves grene, Under the grene-wode tre."[33]